In February 1924, during the peak of the Prohibition era and amid the rampant disregard of the 18th Amendment that presaged its failure as public policy, law enforcement officials burst into a Front Street garage in Hartford and discovered, hidden beneath boards, a subterranean chamber filled with hundreds of gallons of alcohol.

Buried 20 feet below a tiny 14-by-18-inch manhole was an underground storeroom where three of Hartford's most active liquor salesmen kept their supply. The storeroom was filled with 61 five-gallon cans of "hooch," a quantity police said was enough to quench the thirst of Hartford's entire drinking population — a not insignificant share of the city's residents during the dry decade. The seized cans filled several jail cells at the local police station to the brim.

The 1924 Front Street raid by state, federal and local agents followed four years of underground activity on Hartford's East Side, and the lawbreaking would continue for years more. Despite targeted law enforcement efforts in that neighborhood during more than a decade of Prohibition, lawlessness persisted, as did the constant cat-and-mouse game, which kept jail cells full and court dockets flooded.

The Front Street men were promptly arrested and charged with violating the liquor law. But that did little to dampen the efforts of many others who used clever methods to conceal their supplies, elude law enforcement and distribute liquor to dance halls, saloons and restaurants throughout the city.

In January 1921, on the first anniversary of the 18th Amendment, a Courant articledeclared that "Prohibition has not taken all the joy out of those troughs that are ever parched."

"Though the bartender's white coat and apron are less fashionable than formerly, the concoctions which they served so genially are still in vogue," the article read. "And it might be said that some things of which the most imaginative bartender never dreamed of have been added to the list of beverages designed to make earthly troubles seem unreal and remote."

That was the case on Hartford's East Side throughout the 1920s. Largely populated by European immigrants and their descendants, the neighborhood was flush with liquor during the dry years and a constant headache for local law enforcement.

Make-your-own was a popular practice, but the booze came in from all directions. Rum runners docked at Long Island Sound ports and sent it inland. Highway bootleggers kept a steady stream flowing into the city from some of the most powerful whiskey rings in Manhattan.

Saloons, and then speakeasies, sprang up on every block of the East Side neighborhood that lies just west of the Capitol, where in 1920 Connecticut lawmakers were among those in only two states (the other was Rhode Island) who had voted against ratifying the 18th Amendment, which banned the sale, transfer and production of alcohol.

Courant Investigation

A January 1921 Courant investigation cast light on this underground activity that raged through the East Side as the first year of Prohibition was winding to a close. The paper published a list of locations where liquor was being sold and decried unbridled drunkenness throughout the neighborhood, charging that the widespread use of alcohol was responsible for the "deplorable condition of Hartford's East Side."

"Intoxicated men were making nuisances of themselves on every street, and in many restaurants and clubs," The Courant reported. Immediately following publication, federal authorities called an emergency conference in Boston and within days federal Prohibition enforcement agents descended on the city, launching raids that continued for more than a decade.

But quick-thinking bootleggers and bathtub-gin brewers anticipated the law enforcement response to The Courant's exposé and took cover quickly. Twenty dry sleuths spent hours scouring the East Side for illegal activity but netted only three arrests, including one at a candy store where a woman was selling "something other than soda water" and another at a barbershop where they found bottles "containing the makings for all kinds of highballs." Three preceding days of raids by police had either cleaned up the city or driven moonshiners and bootleggers to cover, authorities told The Courant.

Liquor law violators may have been driven out of sight, but the city was far from cleaned up. In the months that followed, law enforcement officials relied on The Courant's list of "suspected joints" to identify raid targets. They would watch the locations from afar to obtain evidence before banging down the doors, destroying saloon furnishings and dragging those who produced liquor into court.

Agents entered a Russian restaurant at 375 Windsor St. to see those inside pouring liquor down a drain. The quantity seized was far smaller than they hoped, but distributed among a large number of bottles. A year later, after more than a dozen raids, officials executed a successful raid there in November 1922 and seized 20 gallons of alcohol.

When the dry squad raided a restaurant down the street at 370 Windsor St. the same year, they were greeted by the proprietor's wife, who began flinging bottles at those who entered. One Prohibition enforcement agent was hit by a well-aimed milk bottle hurled at his head. Other agents dodged flying beer bottles as they tried to collect whiskey as evidence, which the woman had dumped into a pail when they entered her store.

Some lawbreakers were prepared for the raids, leading authorities to suspect the existence of an organized crime network that alerted liquor law violators to upcoming visits from the dry squad. A notorious "refreshment establishment" at 377 Windsor St. was visited multiple times, but officers said that each time they attempted to raid the store, proprietors had been warned. Frustrated officials told The Courant they frequently conducted raids only to learn that proprietors had been tipped off — the result, they believed, of an underground network that kept the liquor business thriving.

East Side Rum Crusade

Following events like these in the early 1920s, Hartford County State's Attorney Hugh Alcorn launched an aggressive campaign against the East Siders. Nationally reputed as a powerful prosecutor, Alcorn held office for more than three decades and led prosecutions throughout the duration of the Prohibition era. In June 1923, he enlisted county Det. Edward Hickey, his own appointee, and Hartford police Sgt. Isaac Kroopneck to lead a series of East Side raids, promising to shutter every saloon in the city and make Hartford "bone dry."

"The announced and pretended use of saloons to pose as restaurants was a sham and subterfuge to conceal their illegal liquor traffic," he declared, stating what was obvious to even a stumbling drunk.

Kroopneck, knew every liquor emporium in the city, Alcorn reasoned. Together, he and Hickey could quash the illegal activity.

Despite their crusade's initial success, Alcorn would turn out to be very wrong.

Kroopneck and Hickey visited places that were still buzzing despite having been raided several times before. With crowbars, axes and chisels, the two raiders "instilled fear in the hearts of Hartford's bootleggers by their ruthless methods," according to a Courant article. That first summer, 150 saloons were shut down.

But by April 1924, The Courant was reporting that "officials of the Hartford police department are becoming cynical when discussing the Volstead Act and persistently maintain there is more drunkenness now than before prohibition went into effect."

One of the problems for Hartford authorities was the extent to which they were limited in their ability to stop the flow of liquor into the city. Snapping padlocks on saloon doors did not stem the supply at its source.

That year marked the start of a different and far more violent battle between law enforcement and liquor lovers, this one waged offshore. Coast Guard officials and sea-patrolling Prohibition agents were no match against rum runners who traveled in speedboats back and forth between ports in Connecticut and large ocean steamers stationed at "Rum Row" — a safe zone in international waters 12 miles offshore, where the U.S. Constitution was not enforceable and the liquor cargo thus not at risk of being seized.

The trip between Rum Row and Connecticut's shoreline was the anchor leg in a multistage, international rum-running operation to get liquor to the state's thirsty residents. Shipments from Europe were sent to a "supply depot" in Bermuda or the Bahamas, then up to Rum Row. Rumrunners darted into ports from the boats docked at sea and, after dropping off their loads, zipped back to safe waters.

At the beginning, marine patrol boats were futile against swift crafts favored by the rumrunners. The first Prohibition-era marine battles in Long Island Sound occurred in the spring of 1924 and made the authorities aware of their ineffectiveness. In one encounter in June, the Fantesma, a yacht believed to be carrying 2,500 cases of liquor, escaped to sea after being pursued by authorities, the boat's armor plates protecting it from a spray of bullets fired by New York Prohibition agents.

Authorities exhausted their ammunition, ran down their fuel and returned to port defeated, after "scarcely escaping the approaching prows of the rum carrier and her scouts."

According to the next day's Courant, the government lost the battle "due to the smallness of the marine patrol boats ... which were unable to withstand the sea kicked up by the powerful yachts."

The Prohibition enforcement agents knew how so much whiskey was making its way inland, but found themselves unprepared for the contest on the Sound. Coast Guardsmen stationed in Connecticut were about to take on a significant role in Prohibition enforcement during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

A year later, better equipped to handle the rumrunning operations, authorities launched a campaign they said would wipe out Rum Row. Twenty-three boats, including five "speedy cutters", six patrol boats and 12 converted submarine chasers, were enlisted in the Prohibition fleet. Engines were fine-tuned "in anticipation of speed contests with the more courageous of the whisky buccaneers."

Machine guns were readied for action, and were used frequently in Sound battles throughout the second half of the Prohibition era. New London Coast Guardsmen in December 1930 captured the Eleanor Joan, a 125-foot schoonercarrying 2,800 sacks of Canadian whiskey and champagne, after firing several shells at it during a 10-minute chase. The schooner tried to dash to open sea but could not outrun the new, speedy patrol boats.

Also as part of the campaign launched in 1925, authorities assigned one or more Coast Guard boats, many of them from the New London base, to watch each of the floating warehouses on the row every hour. They said this would prevent the transfer of stocks into the smaller boats that shuttled between the illicit fleet and the shores of Connecticut. What was not foreseen, however, was the potential for corruption of the low-salaried officials charged with this task.

That would become apparent several months later when authorities broke open what was described at the time as the largest rum ring in the history of Prohibition and the "backbone" of Rum Row. A massive law enforcement operation by 50 Prohibition agents, deputy U.S. marshals and other patrolmen resulted in 20 arrests, including several Coast Guard agents who were accused of accepting bribes to allow rumrunners to continue down the Sound. The ring had offices throughout New York, including one at Grand Central Terminal. It also had an office in New London.

Charged as the ringleader was multimillionaire sportsman and society bootlegger Bill Dwyer of Long Island. Dwyer, who was said to have controlled 18 ocean steamers on Rum Row, was accused of masterminding the "largest, wealthiest, most efficient and most sinister smuggling ring known to history."

"For more than two years Coast Guard boats have been in the pay of this defendant," federal prosecutors said at his arraignment. "His agents did the bribing and the vessel was allowed to proceed up the river."

Also arraigned that day were four Coast Guard officials stationed in New London. By December 1925, 17 Coast Guardsmen stationed in the area were in custody on liquor-related charges— some after being found intoxicated aboard patrol boats.

New London Cmdr. William Munter said his men's weakness was due to "a lack of a sense of values" where liquor was concerned. "A man who would not think of stealing $10 and who is generally honest will consider it within his right to take liquor," he said, adding that "it is surprising how the gift of a little champagne or whisky will turn men."

Prohibition was instituted to curb immoral behavior, behavior that temperance unions said resulted from over-consumption of alcohol. But now, at least according to Munter, the ban itself was driving corruption.

Munter said he could not explain how "whole crews become corrupted" but expressed his belief that "the strange, popular attitude of the men toward liquor is what makes them susceptible to advances by the rum runner."

The large payments that rumrunners offered agents made the agents even more susceptible to manipulation.

The Coast Guard was not the only branch of law enforcement plagued by corruption during Prohibition years. In 1927, Connecticut State Police arrested two federal Prohibition agents in a bust that authorities said broke open a smuggling ring of massive proportions. State police made the arrests after receiving a tip about a parade of smugglers. They stationed themselves at a highway bridge in Groton and waited for their catch, which came in the form of two fancy limousines and two large trucks carrying $250,000 worth of liquor. The federal agents, who were riding in the limos, carrying revolvers and proudly displaying their badges, said they seized the liquor at gunpoint in Massachusetts the previous day. Those claims were not corroborated. Both agents were arrested and charged with transportation of liquor.

As prosecutors began to crack down on large-scale smuggling rings, they hauled convicts back into court to testify. Anthony Perotti of New Haven was described as the "king of bootleggers" when captured in the early 1920s. Years later he was transported from prison to the witness stand to testify in trials of others whom authorities now believed were orchestrating the liquor trafficking.

Aggressive efforts in the late 1920s to break open the smuggling rings did not stop liquor from continuing to flow freely into Hartford, where East Side speakeasies had become a fixture. Alcorn's raids several years earlier had closed the saloons, but had not stopped the underground liquor business. Innocuous storefronts disguised "speakeasies," where drinking had to be done quietly to avoid police attention. Peepholes through which proprietors scrutinized their patrons before every transaction were drilled into dark doorways and partitions at the end of bars.

"Like cats, every speakeasy has at least nine lives," the head of the local liquor squad told The Courant in 1929; the article also described the "cunning with which police intervention is staved off."

Those running the illegal bars were adept at keeping businesses running in spite of repeated police efforts to shut the establishments down. Each time the proprietor of one of these speakeasies, also known as "blind tigers," was arrested, his bail was posted immediately and his store reopened for business within an hour — but with a new "proprietor" behind the counter, law officials said.

The year before, in just a few months of raids of an "innocent looking cigar store" on State Street, the liquor squad arrested five different owners. Each time agents returned they found a new cleverly devised spot for hiding alcohol and destroyed a different section of the building. They knocked down half a wall to remove copper tanks filled with whiskey and gin. They bashed the chimney, where gin was hidden. An officer told The Courant that bootleggers were "practically inviting the squad to come into the places to see if they can find the contraband merchandise."

In the sixth raid of the State Street smoke shop, police arrested Joseph Tinerella, a "happy-go-lucky bootlegger" who offered towels, soap and cold bottles of soda water to the tired and thirsty officers after they destroyed his building.

But not all East Side bootleggers were so easy-going, and at times dealings among them turned violent.

Sebastian Aliano operated several speakeasies on the East Side, most of them disguised as smoke shops. He was known as one of only a handful of people to apply the principle of chain stores to the underground liquor business, and was for some time quite successful. All that changed after he killed a rival bootlegger in a feud outside a blind tiger and fled before authorities could arrest him. His escape and the subsequent murder investigation drew such police attention that it temporarily scared East Side speakeasy proprietors into halting their business. Aliano eventually surrendered in New York City to Hickey — the Hartford County detective still tirelessly pursuing liquor law violators.

Alcorn, who was growing weary as Prohibition dragged on and efforts to enforce it appeared more futile each day, used the Aliano trial to seek more information from witnesses about the East Side speakeasies — how their presence tripled in the late 1920s despite aggressive police efforts throughout that decade and how it came to be that many were established so close to the local police station.

Whether that was the turning point for Alcorn is unclear. But by 1931, Courant headlines — which two years earlier had reported how bootleggers outsmarted the authorities — were declaring him the victor.

"Cleverness Has Become Chief Weapon of Hartford's Liquor Squad in Fight Against Law Violators," a Courant headline read. "Pipe-Lines and Secret Panels Abound in East Side 'Joints' Although the Police are Fast Learning the 'Tricks of the Trade.'"

The article said that "except in rare instances, the Hartford bootlegger cannot hope to keep his activities secret from the police. He can only hope to outwit the law. Sometimes he does but in the large majority of cases he is eventually caught."

This improved ability of police to capture the lawbreakers was buttressed by promises from Hartford judges to dole out harsh punishment to bootleggers, who had dominated dockets for more than 10 years. Alcorn vowed to prosecute liquor law violators to the fullest extent. Mass closings of speakeasies soon followed.

By the end of 1932, drunkenness arrests were down and the liquor flow on the East Side slowed to a trickle, The Courant reported. The following spring, the return of legal beer hit some of the speakeasy locations hard. Although there was still demand for the "hard stuff", many customers were drawn away when beer returned. Other blind tigers suffered as a result of the Great Depression. Some speakeasies remained in the city after Prohibition was repealed, as dealers who had grown accustomed to their unregulated business were not ready to submit to the burdens of regulation, but persistent law enforcement efforts eventually wiped them out.

Connecticut voted to ratify the 21st Amendment ending Prohibition in June 1933, and the 18th Amendment was repealed that December.

"The city greeted the advent of the new order with a rather dignified 'whoopee,'" according to a Dec. 7, 1933, Courant article describing the return of legal liquor.

"Perhaps it was the fact that palates hardened to the mulish kick of bootleg liquor found the wines and beers which could be served in public places a little on the mild side."

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For weeks Ottilie Lundgren hadn't been able to shake a pesky cold, so when her niece Shirley Davis visited her Oxford home on a Friday morning and found the 94-year-old woman was having difficulty breathing, they went to the hospital.